blogpost
Tuesday, December 2, 2025
Another year has passed, and it’s time to update my app defaults. A lot has happened in the world since Andrew, Martin, and Jason of Hemispheric Views listed their defaults for the first time.
I’ve tried to ditch big‑tech companies and move my data and services to more open platforms, some of them self‑hosted.
Indicated are unchanged entries (🔒) and updated entries (✨). I still use the various categories as written by Andrew:
- 🔒 Mail Client: Mail
- 🔒 Mail Server: posteo.net - still a secondary account on iCloud with custom domain
- 🔒 Notes: Obsidian - Notes.app is empty now
- ✨ To-Do: Pen and Paper - still use Remind Me Faster w/ Reminders.app (NextCloud) to capture things on the go and transfer them to my Bujo later
- 🔒 iPhone Photo Shooting: iOS Camera
- ✨ Photo Management: Photos - looking into ente and Immich (self-hosted) in parallel
- 🔒 Calendar: Calendar - Data moved to NextCloud; using a couple of other apps besides, like Grila or Dato
- ✨ Cloud file storage: Koofr, Filen.io, and NextCloud - this is a mess, have to consolidate; some app data still on iCloud because of lock-in
- ✨ RSS: Classic Reeder and NetNewsWire with FreshRSS (self-hosted) - left Feedbin behind, was using it with Unread in between
- 🔒 Contacts: Contacts - Data moved to NextCloud
- 🔒 Browser: Safari
- ✨ Chat: iMessage, Threema, and Signal - still have WhatsApp installed, but don’t start conversations there and try not to use it at all; access to contacts, pictures, etc. is blocked
- ✨ Bookmarks: Linkding (self-hosted) - switched from Anybox
- 🔒 Read It Later: Readwise Reader - evaluating Readeck (self-hosted)
- 🔒 Word Processing: Pages (MS Word at work) - trying to get familiar with LibreOffice, but it’s so ugly 😢
- 🔒 Spreadsheets: Numbers (MS Excel at work) - cf. above
- 🔒 Presentations: Keynote - cf. above
- 🔒 Shopping Lists: Pons
- 🔒 Meal Planning: Mela
- 🔒 Budgeting & Personal Finance: YNAB - already set-up Actual (self-hosted) but did not switch yet
- 🔒 News: Mastodon, tagesschau.de
- 🔒 Music: Apple Music - started playing around with Navidrome (self-hosted)
- ✨ Podcasts: Overcast - back to Overcast; I’ve used Apple Podcasts and Queue in between
- ✨ Password Management: 1Password - back to 1PW, iCloud Keychain was degraded to “backup”
Update 2025-12-03: removed note to myself
Thursday, August 15, 2024
I think we now live in a time where people don’t really wonder about things like usernames anymore. But maybe some of you have wondered about mine?
I’ve only been using esamecar for two or three years. Before that, I had a series of others, but for most services, I usually used the same one at the same time. I still somehow remember two of them. As a child or teenager, I naturally wanted a username that mainly sounded cool. Any appended numbers, like year of birth, were an absolute no-go for me. I’ve also never really been a fan of l33t speech. So the options were a little more limited. But, initially, it wasn’t necessary for my username to be globally unique. It was enough if it wasn’t used in the BBS network or in the Usenet groups where you were active. I believe, but I’m not 100% sure anymore, that I came up with Zodiac at the beginning of my BBS days and then years later realized that there were other people on Usenet who were much more well-known than me and had the same name. So I needed a new one.
After that, I had the username paxton for what feels like decades. I was a big fan of Bill Paxton from a specific, quite well-known sci-fi movie. But there were already others who had made a name for themselves earlier in the world wide web, and I don’t mean the actor, who probably wasn’t really hanging around in the interwebs at those times.
Therefore, I was looking for the next username and, because I became a scientist, decided on “Racemase”. Racemase sounds like an artificial term, many Americans pronounce it like “Race Maze”. But it’s actually the German term for an enzyme from the group of isomerases that enables the conversion between the two enantiomers of a substance. Anyway.
I don’t know exactly when and why, but I probably messed up and registered one or two accounts with this username and then forgot that I did and couldn’t remember the email address I was using for password recovery. Suddenly, I wasn’t able (re)register for those online communities with my chosen username when my interest returned. So I needed something new again, as I don’t wanted to be racemase68 on PSN.
And since I was very uncreative, I simply started writing racemase backwards, and now I often use this completely artificial word esamecar as an username for English-speaking communities and continue to use racemase for German-speaking ones. Let’s see how long that lasts.
Now, you know 🤷♂️🤣.
Update
- 2024-08-15 19:31: Slightly rephrased some paragraphs and eliminated a few typos.
Sunday, August 27, 2023 →
How to use kagi search within Launchbar
There is a kagi help document for Alfred and another one for Search Templates in Launchbar I used as a reference. It’s really easy to set up:
- In your Browser
- go to kagi.com / Settings / Account
- copy your Session Link
- Invoke Launchbar
- select
Menu bar / Index / Show Index
- in Launchbar index go to
Web / My Search Templates -> add a new one
- paste your Session Link into the Template URL field
- append
&q=%s
- done
Sunday, January 29, 2023
I still felt sickly, so I refrained from cycling. Hope that I get the curve then next week.
- 🍿 Watched Raymond & Ray (2022) - ★★★★☆ and enjoyed it.
- 🎙️ Listend to a bunch of different Podcasts:
- 🎙️ This was my first episode of Launched. It was a rather intimate podcast. And both the developers of the Darknoise app and Sofa seem to be very nice people. After what they said about software subscriptions, I’m afraid that sooner or later all apps will have to switch to the subscription model. I personally don’t like that, but if there’s no other way for indie developers, you probably have to think about what you’re willing to spend per year and then keep an eye on your subscriptions, e.g. with Bobby, and limit them accordingly.
- 🛋️ Speaking of Sofa. I really like the app, but I think I’ll try to stay away from software and services where it’s not possible to get your data out again with open standards, an API or at least an RSS feed.
- 🫰 Speaking of subscriptions, after all this back and forth, I cancelled my Strava subscription. I’ll see if I can enjoy cycling without all their pro features.
- 🚴♂️ Speaking of (I know, I know …) cycling, once again I have felt annoyed, no, threatened by SUV drivers. I really don’t know where all this is going. Fittingly, the post about the size of cars.
- 🐘 I had a look at Tusker, a new iOS Mastodon client. It’s still fun to see all these many ideas for Mastodon clients. There hasn’t been so much dynamism in the scene for a long time. Even though IceCube gets a lot of praise, I keep coming back to Ivory, which was finally released in the App Store this week. You can only have missed it, though, if you’ve been living under a rock. Even though I find the development speed of IceCube absolutely remarkable and the app is certainly one of the most impressive in terms of features, I am still bothered by the many small bugs and especially the bad scrolling performance. (I think SwiftUI might be the one to blame here.) Ivory, on the other hand, is really fast and performant. The great thing is that you can change at any time.
- 🕹️ I’ve played the two new playdate games that were released for me this week: Flipper Lifter and Echoic Memory. I am really bad at audio and don’t know if I enjoy Echoic Memory and I haven’t found any access to Flipper Lifter yet. In general, with some playdate games, I sometimes feel like I don’t really understand the mechanics of the game, and just do anything that will somehow get me to the goal. I sometimes wish the games would introduce you a little more and not leave you completely out in the cold.
- 🕹️ In the end, everything was overshadowed by the fact that my playdate probably has a faulty battery. I have, surprisingly unexpectedly, received an answer from Cabel, but unfortunately not yet from support. They seem to be quite overwhelmed by support requests right now.
- 📱 On iOS, I looked at Countdown to Anything! but I think I’ll stick with Countdowns.
- 📱 This screenshot of Jason’s homescreen inspired me to tinker a little bit with Widgy. I also bought Opener, don’t know why 😇
- 💻 On the Mac, I’ve been looking at the new Arc browser, which is kind of hyped right now. I really don’t know why though. I have a bit of a suspicion that it might just be the invite system. To me, the browser seems extremely sluggish. My password management and Apple Pay don’t work, which is probably not the browser’s fault. It’s too early to judge, but so far I always go back to Safari after a short time.
- 💻 It came to my mind, that you can use Markdown links of hooked items together with One Thing, an App that I really enjoy. It gives you one click menu bar item to the one file you are just working on.
- 💻 I had a look at HiDock, for Mac and Lasso - Window Manager for macOS.
- 💻 Thanks to Matthew I became aware of Menubar X (Setapp). This works pretty well together with DeepL / DeepL Write and elk.zone.
- ✅ I’ve moved all my todo item for work from OmniFocus to Apple’s Reminders app. I want to see if I can separate them enough thanks to smart lists and tags. The only thing I miss so far is the ability to filter by focus modes, like it is possible with Calendars, etc. Only Apple knows why this is not possible yet, I guess.
- ❤️ Thanks to Faisal Misle, I now also know that you can publish to the omg.lol weblog via github. I have no idea about all these things, but thanks to the many great tutorials, even I managed to do it. Speaking of omg.lol and how clueless I am about all this internet stuff, I managed to change my status.log via the API, again thanks to the awesome docs. I control this with a Shortcuts shortcut and can trigger it from my Stream Deck and Keyboard Maestro. You can do so many funny things with this 🥰
🙋♂️
PS: I’ve also posted my thoughts on the first, second and third weeks.
Sunday, January 22, 2023
Streak, this is the third time this year I’ve managed to write down what I’ve done during the week.
If you’re interested in what it was like before, you can read about the first and second week.
- I have been very busy at work this week. So there was less to discover. I did a lot of walking with the dog (~ 50 km from Monday to Saturday so far), so at least I had enough time to listen to podcasts:
- For these posts, I was looking for a way to log the podcast episodes I was listening to, but couldn’t find a way to look them up in Overcast. So I wrote a Shortcuts script that logs the currently playing episode to a Drafts document after 30 seconds.
- 🥘 Speaking of the Shortcuts app. I love Mela and in my family we use Pon for shopping lists. Unfortunately, there is no way to export shopping lists directly from Mela to Pon. And it is not possible to import the corresponding Reminders list into Pon. So I put together a little shortcut that somehow does the job.
- ❤️ I was playing around with my omg/now page.
- 💻 I bought Photos Workbench. I think I will mainly use it to compare and select pictures. I really miss a corresponding function in the Photos app. I have looked a lot for alternatives and had even subscribed to Lightroom in the meantime. But that’s a complete overkill and I don’t want to have any more software from that company. That’s why I’m happy that an app has now been released that will hopefully take care of that.
- 🕹️ Played Pick Pack Pup (2022) and the first ten levels of Gravity Express. The former is fine but I did not fell in love so far. The latter ist very similar to Rocket Bytes but Gravity Express has checkpoints, tasks, fuel, etc. I seems not that hardcore as the other. I really like what I’ve seen so far.
- 🗼Stumbled across Lantern.
- Bought Homecoming for Mastodon. I think this can easily be done via Shortcuts too but anyways …
- 📺 No TV, now movies this week 😢
- 🧊Gave the IceCubeApp beta another try. Unlike many others, I’m not warming up to the app. It has too many little bugs that make it hard for me to use it regularly. But of course, the whole App Store approval saga was funny - or rather the opposite.
- 🎙️MacWhisper: It’s absolutely impressive what’s now possible.
- 💬 Too much Mastodon but I really like it there. And Gruber even replied to me. He disagreed and I didn’t want to argue, but whatever!
Sunday, January 15, 2023
After all, this is the second time this year that I’ve managed to write down a bit what has been keeping me busy during the week. 🥳
- 😔 So, this was my first week at work and thus, unfortunately, again far too little time for things I really enjoy. (I’ll have to think about my work situation in great detail at some point).
- 🕹 Playdate: After the two pre-installed games on my playdate, the first two new games included in Episode 1 arrived for me on Monday: Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure and Boogie Loops. Unfortunately, I’m completely musically untalented, so I haven’t looked at Boogie Loops yet, but I despair of Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure. As a now completely inexperienced player, I fail grandiosely at this game. For me it is extremely difficult. I just got to level 20 and I was told that there must be 50 levels. Another game on the list of games I will never play through. Bloom meanders along. I find it a bit of a pity that in the dialogues there are really only the same statements available, each worded a little differently. I don’t feel that you can really influence the story. I’m not 100% sure if I would buy the game again. I had a quick look at EYELAND. However, it doesn’t support savegames and so far I haven’t felt like trying to tackle it in one go.
- 🎧 Podcasts: Despite the ones I regularly listen to (ATP, The Talk Show, Automators, Connected, Techmeme Ride Home) and due to my recent interest in micro.blog and omg.lol, I stumbled upon Hemispheric Views by Andrew Canion, Jason Burk, and Martin Feld as well as Core Intuition by Manton Reece and Daniel Jalkut.
- 📔 I’ve written a follow up post to my short list of non-work related macOS apps I really like: Even more macOS apps I enjoy using 😎
- 🍿 I’ve watched Avatar: The Way of Water in the cinema with my family. Bombastic, sure, but - as expected - completely irrelevant and above all predictable plot. Still, I didn’t regret going to the cinema again.
- 📺 Together with my wife I finished watching the third season of For All Mankind. I think I liked it better than the second and I’m looking forward to the fourth.
- 🤓 Because of omg.lol , I tried to understand IRC. It’s been a long time since I was on it. It felt like back in the Amiga days. I’ve installed irssi via Homebrew, was able to connect, but failed with its operation. I’ll have to look at it again some other time. Even though I am not a fan of, I understand very well why Discord etc. have become famous 🤦♂️
- 🍩 I’ve 3Dprinted some small things, primarily for household or work purposes, such as an iPad Stand, to use it as a second monitor at work and a tea bag drainer. And of course things for my AnkerMake M5 itself, like Spare Parts Box and Accessory Bins. (I was already afraid that this is another hobby that is only concerned with itself. In other words, you do things with it that you only do because you now have this thing that does things … You understand me.)
- 🤯 For me, I still haven’t been able to conclusively determine on which platform I want to follow whom and where I want to post something and how. The interoperability of the fedivers (micro.blog <-> mastodon together with RSS etc.) is ingenious, but it also leads to a lot of friction and redundancy at least for me. I definitely need to get better at this. In all the experimenting I’ve been doing over the last few days, I’ve often had the problem of finding the exact URL of an RSS feed. To achive this via Reeder or similar was too cumbersome for me and the times when the browser I use simply displayed the feeds prominently are also long gone. I have therefore created an iOS/macOS shortcuts. I’m not good at it, but it does the job I hope.
- 👨💻 Oh, I almost forgot. The battery on my private Intel MacBook Pro was dead. I had it replaced. It cost me € 229 - not exactly cheap. But the whole thing, including sending it in (to the Czech Republic, repair and return) took less than three days 👏. However, I got a new top case with a new keyboard etc., which probably wasn’t a bad idea for that model. Since it had already been in use for several years, I decided to completely rebuild it. I would have preferred to save myself the experience. So many little macOS (iCloud) bugs in the process really annoyed me and the new system settings are hell.
🙋♂️
Saturday, January 14, 2023
Sure, shortly after I’ve published the short list of non-work related macOS apps I really like it came to my mind, that I forgot the most important ones. But hey, I never claimed it was an exhaustive list 😇
So, I’ll just continue and list randomly some more apps, I enjoy using:
- Mela: “Mela is a simple, elegant and modern recipe manager that syncs with iCloud." I recently switched from Paprika, which is also a very good recipe manager. But I do prefer the app from Silvio Rizzi (Mastodon/rizzi@gloria.social) because of its more modern design and the build in recipe RSS feature 👨🍳. RSS is something Silvio knows a lot about, as he is also responsible for my RSS reader of choice:
- Reeder: “Keep control of your news reading with Reeder, RSS reader and read later client in one app, now with support for iCloud syncing." Of course there is a bunch of other RSS readers 📰. If I had to switch, I would probably go with NetNewsWire.
- Dropover: “Dropover is a macOS utility that makes Drag and Drop easier. Stash, gather or move draggable content without having to open side-by-side windows." Before I’ve stumbled upon Dropover I’ve used Yoink for years (Setapp). I do like both apps. With the former, you don’t always have to wander 🖱️ all the way to the edge of the screen to drop files. I kind of liked that. Yoink also has a counterpart for iOS.
- Soulver: “Soulver is a notepad calculator app for Mac. It’s a notepad that gives instant answers to calculations in your text." Soulver is also such a macOS classic. Since version 3, the Mac app is unfortunately no longer compatible with the iOS version and I have a little impression that the developer has lost a little desire 🥱. But nevertheless, it’s a great tool. [Update 19.01.2023: I have learned, that the iOS version has been discontinued but instead the Mac version is now on Setapp.
- Money Money: “Alle Bankkonten im Blick mit MoneyMoney." Okay, Money Money is specific to the German market. But if you have a bank account there and don’t want to deal with the web interface of your bank 🏦, Money Money is a great choice. The app only costs money once and I don’t remember ever being asked to pay for an update. (That scares me a little bit, I have to admit).
- Day One: “Day One is a journaling app for the iPhone, iPad and Mac. From once-in-a-lifetime events to everyday moments, Day One’s elegant interface makes journaling your life a simple pleasure." My first entry 📔 dates back to 2012, and I have ~10 k entries saved in there. I think that says it all 😄 I do pipe a lot of stuff to Day One with the help of ifttt.
- Bartender 4: “Bartender is an award-winning app for macOS that superpowers your menu bar, giving you total control over your menu bar items, what’s displayed, and when, with menu bar items only showing when you need them." I run a lot of menu bar apps. Therefore this app (Setapp) is indispensable for me on my 13” MacBook 💻. Speaking of menu bar apps:
- Coca: “Coca is a tiny app that puts an icon in your menu bar. Right-click the icon to prevent your system from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers." Very handy in certain circumstances, e.g. you want that backup / download to finish over night etc. There are lots of similar apps, like Amphetamine or Caffeine ☕.
- AirBuddy: “Take Control of Your Wireless Devices on macOS." If you own Air Pods 🎧 and want to switch from iPhone to Mac, have a look at this utility (Setapp). And speaking of music:
- NepTunes: “A desktop accessory that allows you to see and control your music (Apple Music, Spotify) with customizable shortcuts, advanced Last.fm support and beautiful themes." Any nice app that results in me having to open Apple’s music 🎵 app less often is a win.
Thursday, January 12, 2023
Here is a short list of apps I use a lot under macOS privately (so not only work related) or I have recently discovered and think I’ll stick with them.
-
Bunch: Bunch describes itself as “a macOS utility that uses plain text scripts called “Bunches” to automate context switching. It sits in your menu […]. Bunches can open apps, specific files, web pages, and more. For the Power Users, It also allows advanced scripting, system commands, and integration via a URL handler”. It’s free to download, developed by Brett Terpstra. I switched from Workspaces by Apptorium, which has a much more sophisticated visual concept. I also like the app very much and is also available via Setapp.
-
Typinator: “Enter words, sentences, or even entire paragraphs by typing just a few characters. Save time for the really important things in life." If I use a Mac without Typinator installed, I can hardly operate it. Therefore, it is one of the first programmes I add. (The second one is 1Password, but if I would start from scratch I would try to use the new build in password manager of macOS / iOS.) Many use Textexpander, but I feel more comfortable without a subscription model.
-
Raycast: “Raycast is a blazingly fast, totally extendable launcher. It lets you complete tasks, calculate, share common links, and much more." Before I discovered Raycast, I’ve used Launchbar for over 15 years. It was one of these apps I would have taken with me to an lonely island. Other apps like Alfred did not stick with me. I still like Launchbar a lot but enjoy the I am currently enjoying the immense expandability and dynamic development of Raycast. Right now Raycast made even my beloved window manager Moom obsolete.
-
Craft: “Create documents, make impact." I really enjoyed using Craft for some time. But actually I think, I should not use another note silo and try to achieve what I want with Apple Notes. Nevertheless, the app is very comprehensive, cross platform and easy to begin with. If you have a Setapp subscription, you should definitely check it out. (At this point, of course, Obsidian and Notion must also be mentioned, but neither of which I use in a private context so far.)
-
Anybox: “Manage bookmarks like a pro. A perfect replacement for your browser’s bookmark manager." I have never been able to make friends with Safari’s bookmark management and used to use various services, including del.icio.us. Then I migrated to pinboard.in, and in the meantime I only used it sporadically. Pins, a very good iOS / macOS pinboard client by Anh Do, motivated me again to use pinboard more extensively. But recently my use declined rapidly again - I don’t know exactly why. I didn’t like well-known alternatives like raindrop.io and then Anybox came along. It’s available for macOS and iOS and more or less saves everthing but I use it solely as a bookmark manager. I’m actually very happy with it, although I’m curious to see whether the developer of pins can motivate me to switch again with his new app Interlink. (I hardly know why I save my bookmarks in the first place. Most of the time I look them up again using a search engine anyway.)
-
CleanShot X: “Capture your Mac’s screen like a pro." Before I stumbled across CleanShot X, I used the native screenshot function of macOS, which is also quite extensive. In addition I used OwlOCR. A utility that allows you to capture areas of the screen and then copy the text contained therein directly to the clipboard. (Textsniper is also often recommended, but I liked the pricing and the support of OwlOCR much better. BTW Textsniper is on Setapp.) I use this function daily and frequently. I would not want to do without it any more. In the meantime, on the latest version of macOS it is possible to extract text with board tools, at least in photos and I think also in other apps, but I have become so used to cmd+shift+2 (my assigned shortcut) that I no longer want to do without it. What does all this have to do with CleanShot? This function is also implemented and so much more. Also available via Setapp.
-
Rocket: “Mind-blowing emoji on your Mac." I really enjoy using this emoji picker. Tried using the one from Recast but went back to Rocket.
-
Quitall: “Before you Force Quit, QuitAll. A fresh start without a restart." If it wasn’t included in my Setapp subscription I probably would not have bought it. I know it’s a bad habit under macOS to quit apps but sometimes I have so many of them open, that I prefer a fresh start. That’s were Quintal comes into play.
-
Hookmark: “Search Less. Focus more." If you haven’t heart of Hookmark yet, go and check it out. It’s really awesome and I wish something like this was build directly into macOS. You can more or less interlink everything. Also available via Setapp.
-
And of course there are some productivity apps I mainly use for work Dash, DevonThink, Default Folder X, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel and ChronoSync. Maybe I’ll write a little more about them later.
-
Oh, I would have forgotten about CCC: “CCC does everything you wish Time Machine did (and more!)" Buy it, use it! (Or SuperDuper! I don’t care 😎)
Update: even more apps …
Sunday, January 8, 2023
I was motivated by muhh’s blog entry to write down what was on my mind in the first week of January. I’m not sure yet if this will become something more regular, but I wanted to start putting something online more often anyway - more on that below.
I’ve had the last two weeks off. The weather was bad, I had a cold 🤧 and therefore a lot of cycling wasn’t an option either (at least that’s what I told myself). So, I used the time to hang out at the computer a little more than usally. There was a lot of exciting things to discover there.
Somehow Elon started this with the downfall of twitter, which he initiated. I had only been there reading for years anyway, and then after the takeover I decided to download my data, delete the clients on my end devices and no longer use the account.
As an alternative, I was of course interested in Mastodon and clicked an account on the standard instance mastodon.social. Thanks to tools like movetodon and fedifinder my timeline has also filled up pretty quickly, and I actually “met” pretty quickly some real people with whom you could exchange ideas in a friendly manner. All in all a very positive experience.
One great thing about the fediverse is the extreme dynamics of the tools and clients that are currently being built around it. It feels like back in the early days of Twitter where, for example, a single programmer, Loren Brichter, with Tweetie could turn the whole twitter landscape upside down. (BTW he only has an inactive account on Mastodon 😢)
I tried countless clients over a few days. Among others (unsorted)
The official app is okay, but IMHO not great; toot! I liked the range of functions very much, but you also have to cope with the strange design somehow. Because I follow some accounts that post a lot, and since the timeline on Mastodon is not orchestrated by any algorithms, posts from other people are in danger of being lost. Thats why a good list function is very important to me personally. There, Mammoth also makes a very good impression, but in the end I was lucky and was able to test Ivory via Testflight. The app by Paul Haddad and Mark Jardine has an button design that is a bit too playful for my taste, but otherwise it is extremely stable and really great at everything it does. The recently added list features are awesome, as they allow certain accounts to be hidden from the home view. So, atm I stick to Ivory and am looking forward to even better builds.
Then, sometime last week, I came across a post from @otaviocc@social.lol on omg.lol. And then, coincidentally, I signed up for the service with thousands of other people (who must have read a post on Hacker News and not otaviocc’s post 😎).
On omg.lol you ultimately get a “funny” address on the web that contains a wide variety of small services. A single page website (to use as a business card), a statuslog, an omg.lol-email address (forwarder), different DNS services, pastebin, PURL service, a weblog (beta), etc. And while I was at it anyways, I also have my Mastodon account moved from mastodon.social to social.lol. Luckily that went really smoothly. It was a lot of fun getting involved, configuring everything and thinking about what it’s even good for 🤦♂️.
In the meantime, I continued to work with the AnkerMake M5, which also arrived after a very long wait at the beginning of December. All in all I’m very happy with the 3D printer, but still don’t really know what got into me back in early 2022 when I backed it on Kickstarter. But that is definitely going too far at this point and maybe I’ll go into more detail elsewhere.
Well, micro.blog is kind of a universe in itself too. In addition to choosing a theme, there is of course the client question. I got some for iOS (the official app, Gluon for Micro.blog and MacOS (MarsEdit 5, which I use via Setapp) looked at various editors (iA Writer, Drafts and Runestone. In addition, there are useful tools as Mimi Uploader (iOS) to upload images and Epilogue for Micro.blog to track books, but I’m just starting out here, there are just too many apps and I have to see which ones “click” for me.
There are of course all sorts of little helpers for publishing interesting links and posts on Mastodon or blog entries. Among others Linky and Re: Toot by Simon B. Støvring (who, by the way, is also responsible for Runestone) I would like to mention at this point.
As if all that wasn’t enough, at the beginning of last week, after a 1.5 year wait, I received my long-awaited playdate game console. (In the meantime I had actually already forgotten that I had even ordered it and I was all the happier that it suddenly arrived.) It’s a lot of fun to deal with the little yellow box and I wanted to jot down some impressions I got. I rented a domain with Wordpress installed last year already and tried a few things with micro.blog but didn’t really publish anything on either platform. This year I wanted to change that and thus started with a post about the playdate.
All in all, it was an exciting time in terms of IT. Now all of a sudden I somehow have three blogs and will soon have to concentrate on one of them and see when everyday work starts again tomorrow, whether I still have the time and, above all, the desire to continue writing down my thoughts, or these escapades were again one of my “manic” excursions into something new and I would lose interest again the day after tomorrow - which would be a pity.
So, maybe cu next week 🙋♂️
PS: initally, I wanted to talk a little bit about the music and podcasts I’ve listened to, too but this post is already way too long.
Saturday, January 7, 2023
I’ve been a happy owner of a playdate game console for a week now. I ordered it in July 2021 and finally received it a mere 1.5 years later. Since then I’ve really enjoyed the console. Every animation, every sound somehow expresses the joy and dedication that Cable Sasser and his team at Panic evidently put into the development of this – while rather expensive piece of hardware.
I really like the first two games of Series 1 so far and they couldn’t be more different. Whitewater Wipeout is quite a challenging game of skill in the spirit of California Games, which I played with friends for hours on the C64 and immediately brought back fond memories. The game makes very good use of the crank. At first I was happy about 200 points, meanwhile it’s a few thousand and my sons, who grew up with graphically bombastic touchscreen games on iPad and Co. or complex titles on the PS4, also liked it straight away and now fill the high score. However, how you can achieve several million points in this game will probably always remain a mystery to me.
Casual Birder is „a snap-‚em-all adventure set in beautiful seaside Bird Town“ and also entertaining. However, I haven’t really progressed very far here.
I’m definitely looking forward to the next 20 games that are included in the purchase price, which also puts it into perspective, and I’m excited for the upcoming store (aka catalog).
Meanwhile, you can load your own games and applications onto the device via USB or a website (called sideload). A probably almost complete overview of all projects can be found on the playdate community wiki. The games are often offered on itch.io and usually cost somewhere between $1 and $10.
So far I’ve been into Bloom, „a real-time narrative-driven social sim about starting up a flower shop“ and Rocket Bytes, „a 1-bit precision rocket flying reverse platformer“. The former is just plain nice, the latter hard as hell. Other games I would like to check out are EYELAND, Daily Driver (Tech Demo) and A Balanced Brew. And if you have a dollar left over, you can also buy A Joke Thats Worth $0.99 for a smile.
As if that weren’t enough, Panic has an app called Mirror that allows games to be streamed and recorded directly to a monitor. Accessibility has also been considered. And then of course there’s the development environment, once in professional and as if that wasn’t enough, also a comprehensive web editor, with which you can develop really professional games in the browser.
It was also a good thing that I have been the happy owner of an AnkerMake M5 since December 2022, so I was able to get a suitable Magnetic Cover, because unfortunately I didn’t have the official ordered and now the shipping would be more expensive than the case itself ;-(
I’m excited to see how the little yellow part will continue, I’m looking forward to regular game updates for the next eleven weeks and at the same time I’ll be listening to the official podcast. Long story short: for me personally a really compelling overall package.